What about the least essential?
- Tax consultants - helping companies avoid contributing to society
- Marketeers - manipulating people into buying worse products for higher prices
- Middle management - causing a lot of fuzz while doing nothing of significance.
Just to name a few. An artists contribution may be abstract but it’s certainly there. There are others that actively sabotage society and very often they make a lot of money.
TIL: Abdullah Gül
Though I find the predecesor before Gül even more interesting: Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Apparently he was the last secular president of Turkey. “During receptions at the presidential palace, Sezer refused to allow women wearing the headscarf to attend citing the laws on the separation of religion and state at the time; this resulted in the wives of Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan, Hayrünnisa Gül and Emine Erdoğan respectively, being barred from attendance. Erdoğan later said in public that he had ‘suffered a lot’ from Sezer.[3]” So he refused the wives of who would be his successors.
“During the 2014 presidential election, won by Erdoğan, Sezer openly refused to vote, citing the lack of a secularist candidate as his reason” Turkey has a strong secularist tradition and I really hope it returns sometime. Atatürk is still being celebrated, but do people still believe in his secular ideals?